The revelers watched in stunned disbelief, cocktails in hand, dressed
for a night to remember. On the big-screen TV a headline screamed in
crimson red: "Projected Winner: Scott Walker." It was 8:49 p.m. In
parts of Milwaukee, people learned that news networks had declared
Wisconsin’s governor the winner while still in line to cast their votes.
At the election night party for Walker's opponent, Milwaukee Mayor
Tom Barrett, supporters talked and cried and ordered more drinks.
Barrett soon took the stage to concede, then waded into the crowd
where a distraught woman slapped him in the face.

Walker is the first governor in American history to win a recall
election. His lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, dispatched her
recall challenger no less decisively. So, too, did three Republican
state senators in their recall elections. Democrats avoided a GOP sweep
with a win in the sixth and final senate recall vote of the season, in
Wisconsin's southeastern 21st district, but that was small consolation.
Put simply, Democrats and labor unions got rolled.

The results of Tuesday's elections are being heralded as the death of
public-employee unions, if not the death of organized labor itself.
Tuesday's results are also seen as the final chapter in the story of the
populist uprising that burst into life last year in the state capital
of Madison. The Cheddar Revolution, so the argument goes, was buried in
a mountain of ballots.

But that burial ceremony may prove premature. Most of the conclusions of the last few days, left and right, are likely wrong.

Without
Wisconsin, without the knowledge that such things could still happen in
America, there might never have been an Occupy.

The energy of the Wisconsin uprising was never electoral. The
movement’s mistake: letting itself be channeled solely into traditional
politics, into the usual box of uninspired candidates and the usual
line-up of debates, primaries, and general elections. The uprising was
too broad and diverse to fit electoral politics comfortably. You can't
play a symphony with a single instrument. Nor can you funnel the energy
and outrage of a popular movement into a single race, behind a single
well-worn candidate, at a time when all the money in the world from corporate “individuals” and right-wing billionaires is pouring into races like the Walker recall.

Colin Millard, an organizer at the International Brotherhood of
Bridge, Structural, Ornamental, and Reinforcing Iron Workers, admitted
as much on the eve of the recall. We were standing inside his storefront
office in the small town of Horicon, Wisconsin. It was night outside.
"The moment you start a recall," he told me, "you're playing their game
by their rules."

From Madison to Zuccotti Park and Beyond

A recap is in order.

The uprising began with Colin Millard. The date was February 11, 2011, when Walker "dropped the bomb,"
as he later put it, with his "budget repair" bill, which sought to gut
collective bargaining rights for most public-employee unions, Later
that day, a state Democratic Party staffer who knew Millard called him
and pleaded with him to organize a protest. Millard agreed, even though
other unions, including the AFL-CIO, urged him to back out. Don't make
a fuss, they advised. Let's call some lawmakers and urge them to
oppose Walker's bill. "Fuck off," was Millard's response.

Tractors circled the capitol in protest, as did
firefighters and cops, even though their bargaining rights had been
exempted from Walker's "reform" proposals. By now, Madison had captured
the nation's attention.

On the Sunday after Walker unveiled his bill, Millard rounded up more than 200 people
and marched down Lake Street, past the John Deere factory and
Dannyboy's Bar, to the home of Republican Jeff Fitzgerald, the speaker
of the state Assembly and a Walker ally. Fitzgerald lived a mile or two
from Millard in Horicon. "I've got a message for Scott Walker," Millard
told the crowd outside Fitzgerald's house. "This is my union card and
you can pry it from my cold, dead hand."

As rumors spread of more protests, Walker threatened
to call out the National Guard to deal with the protesting public
workers. That's when popular outrage erupted. Students marched on the
state capitol, and then a local teaching assistants union led the effort
to take over the capitol rotunda, transforming intermittent protests
into a round-the-clock occupation.
Organizers provided food, shelter, health care, day care, education,
and a sense of purpose for those who had taken up residence inside the
capitol.

In
support of the occupiers, the daily protests outside the capitol grew
into crowds of 10,000, 25,000, then upward of 100,000. People marched
in the snowy streets to challenge Walker, Wisconsin Republicans, and
their political donors. Tractors circled the capitol in protest, as did
firefighters and cops, even though their bargaining rights had been
exempted from Walker's "reform" proposals. By now, Madison had captured
the nation's attention.

A two-week occupation of the capitol and months of protests didn’t,
however, deter Walker and Republican lawmakers. He signed his budget
repair bill, known as Act 10, into law in March. But that doesn’t mean
the Wisconsin uprising had no effect. For one thing, the "Walkerville"
occupation of the grounds outside the state capitol helped inspire the "Bloombergville"
protest in New York City targeting Mayor Michael Bloomberg. That, in
turn, would be a precursor to the Occupy Wall Street events of the
following September and later the Occupy movement nationwide. Without
Wisconsin, without the knowledge that such things could still happen in
America, there might never have been an Occupy.

Hijacking the Uprising

By the time Occupy Wall Street took off, the Wisconsin uprising had
swapped its come-one-come-all organizing message for a far narrower and
more traditional political mission. Over the summer of 2011, the
decision was made that the energy and enthusiasm displayed in Madison
should be channeled into recall elections to defeat six Republican state senators
who had voted for Walker's anti-union Act 10. (Three Democratic
senators would, in the end, face recall as well.) By that act, Democrats
and unions hoped to wrestle control of the senate away from Walker and
use that new power to block his agenda.

The Democrats won two of the 2011 recalls, one short of gaining
control of the Senate, and so the Republicans clung to their majority.

What followed was more of the same, but with the ante upped. This
time, the marquee race would be the recall of Walker himself. Launched
last November, the grassroots campaign to recall the governor put the
populist heart of the Wisconsin uprising on full display. Organizing
under the United Wisconsin banner, 30,000 volunteers statewide gathered
nearly one million signatures to trigger the election. The group’s
people-powered operation recaptured some of the spirit of the Capitol
occupation, but the decision had been made: recalling Walker at the
ballot box was the way forward.

Wisconsin Awakens a Sleeping GiantWorkers across the country are demanding to know why corporations and
the wealthy get bailouts and tax breaks while teachers and steel workers
bear the burdens of budget crises.

The Walker recall effort would, in fact, splinter the masses of
anti-Walker protesters. Many progressives and most of the state's labor
unions rallied behind former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk who,
in January 2012, announced her intent to challenge Walker. Tom Barrett,
who had lost the governor’s race to Walker in 2010, didn't announce
his candidacy until late March, his entry pitting Democrat against
Democrat, his handful of union endorsements pitting labor against
labor. Unions pumped $4 million into helping Falk clinch the Democratic
nomination. In the end, though, it wasn't close: Barrett stomped her
in the May 8th primary by 24 percentage points.

By now, the Madison movement was the captive of ordinary Democratic
politics in the state. After all, Barrett was hardly a candidate of the
uprising. People who had protested in the streets and slept in the
capitol groused about his uninspired record on workers' rights and
public education. He never inspired or unified the movement that had
made a recall possible—and it showed on Election Day: Walker beat
Barrett by seven percentage points, almost his exact margin of victory
in 2010. Democrats and their union allies needed to win over new voters
and old enemies; by all accounts they failed.

And had Barrett by some miracle won, after a few days of celebration
and self-congratulation, those in the Madison movement would have found
themselves in the same box, in the same broken system, with little
sense of what to do and, in a Barrett governorship, little hope. Win or
lose, there was loss written all over the recall decision.

The Fate of the Uprising

The takeaway from Walker's decisive win on Tuesday is not that
Wisconsin's new populist movement is dead. It's that such a movement
does not fit comfortably into the present political/electoral system,
stuffed as it is with corporate money, overflowing with bizarre ads and
media horse-race-manship. Its members' beliefs are too diverse to be
confined comfortably in what American electoral politics has become. It
simply couldn’t be squeezed into a system that stifles and, in some
cases, silences the kinds of voices and energies it possessed.

The post-election challenge for the members of Wisconsin's uprising
is finding a new way to fight for and achieve needed change without
simply pinning their hopes on a candidate or an election. After all,
that's part of what absorbed the nation when a bunch of students first
moved into the Wisconsin state capitol and wouldn’t go home, or when a
ragtag crew of protesters camped out in lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park
and wouldn't leave either. In both cases, they had harnessed the
outrage felt by so many Americans for a cause other than what’s usually
called “politics” in this country.

Here’s the reality of a deeply
corrupt system: unless Congress and state legislators act to patch up
their tattered campaign finance rulebooks, the same crew with the same
money will continue to dominate the political wars.

And they were successful—even in the most traditional terms; that
is, both movements affected traditional politics most strongly when
they weren’t part of it. The Occupy movement, for all its flaws, moved
even mainstream political discourse away from austerity and deficit
slashing and toward the issues of income inequality and the hollowing
out of the American middle and working classes.

Avoiding politics as we know it with an almost religious fervor,
Occupy still managed to put its stamp on national political fights. Last
October, for instance, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly
to repeal SB 5, a law that curbed collective bargaining rights for all
public-employee unions. Occupy’s "We are the 99%" message reverberated
through Ohio, and the volunteers who blitzed the state successfully
drew on Occupy themes to make their case for the law's repeal. Mary Kay
Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, which
spent $500,000 in Ohio fighting SB 5, told me at the time, "Every
conversation was in the context of the 99% and the 1%, this discussion
sparked by Occupy Wall Street."

The money that flowed into Walker's recall fight speaks loudly to the
disadvantages a Wisconsin-like movement faces within the walls of
electoral politics and the need for it to resist being confined there.
On the post-Citizens Unitedplaying
field, the unlimited amounts of the money that rose to the top of this
society in recent decades, as the 1% definitively separated itself
from the 99%, can be reinvested in preserving the world as it is and
electing those who will make it even more amenable. The advantage
invariably goes corporate; it goes Republican.

The decision on what comes next rests in the
hands of those who inspired and powered the Wisconsin uprising.

Historically, the Republicans have long been the party of big
business, of multinational corporations, of wealthy, union-hating donors
like Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and Amway heir Dick DeVos—and in recent decades the Democrats have followed in their wake
sweeping up the crumbs (or worse). And here’s the reality of a deeply
corrupt system: unless Congress and state legislators act to patch up
their tattered campaign finance rulebooks, the same crew with the same
money will continue to dominate the political wars. (And any movement
that puts its own money on changing those rules is probably in deep
trouble.)

In the wake of the recall losses, the people of Wisconsin's uprising
must ask themselves: Where can they make an impact outside of politics?
The power of nonviolent action to create social and economic change is
well documented, most notably by Jonathan Schell in his classic book The Unconquerable World. The
men and women in Schell's invaluable history—Mohandas Gandhi,
Martin Luther King, Jr. and his civil rights fighters, the Czech
dissident Vaclav Havel, and so many others—can serve as guides to a
path to change that doesn't require recall elections. Already mainstays
of the Madison protests have suggested campaigns to refuse to spend
money with businesses that support Walker. "Hit 'em where it hurts.
Pocketbooks," C.J. Terrell, one of the Capitol occupiers, recently
wrote on Facebook.

Wisconsinites could also turn to one of their own: Robert "Fightin'
Bob" La Follette. He created his own band of "insurgents" within the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century Republican Party. Together
they formed the Progressive Party, which fought for workers' rights,
guarded civil liberties, and worked to squeeze corruption out of
government.

Ultimately, however, the decision on what comes next rests in the
hands of those who inspired and powered the Wisconsin uprising. And with
an emboldened Governor Walker, there should be no shortage of reasons
to fight back in the next two years. But success, as Tuesday's election
made clear, isn’t likely to come the traditional way. It will, of
course, involve unions; it might draw on state and local political
parties. But in the end, it's in the hands of the people again, as it
was in February 2011.

The future they want is theirs to decide.

Cross-posted from .

Interested?

Activists around the world sent statements of solidarity to Wisconsin's protesters.

All around you are everyday heroes who refuse to be complicit in the economic mistreatment of other people.

"We're just trying to have a society here," and other highlights from last spring's protest signs.

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Andy Kroll is a staff reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine. He is also an associate editor at TomDispatch.com, where this article first appeared. He has coveredWisconsinpolitics since the first protests ignited
in February 2011. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio
interview in which Kroll discusses what Scott Walker's recall win means
for the future, click here or download it to your iPod here.